Arbitaapa

Here at IITD, the minors are upon us once again, and as always, they bring out nothing but the worst in all of us. There is just a slight difference. This time, I am strangely unconcerned. All about me, students are losing their heads over AML 160 and EEL 102. Everyone is worried about syllabi and there seems to be a mad rush to procure textbooks. I, on the other hand, have no idea about the date-sheet, and my textbooks are lying around in friends’ cars. All I know is that the minor tests start sometime on Thursday, and I have to take six of them within a period of 3 days. Thursday, however, seems a fair distance away, and as of now, I am spending my days much like I have till now, averaging 2 ‘Coupling’ episodes, 2 ‘South Park’ episodes, 1 ‘The Simpsons’ episode, 1 ‘That 70’s Show’ episode, and a couple of hours of Need For Speed Underground a day, except for on weekends, when I have to forego ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘That 70’s Show’ thanks to the bastards in charge of program scheduling back at Star World. I do not, as yet, feel the tiniest bit of guilt, as I would surely have half a year back, for so blatantly wasting my time. I might flunk all my minors (which, as I said a bit earlier, no longer concerns me), but in the meanwhile, I seem to be having a pretty good time.

I did, however, try studying a bit in the afternoon yesterday, just to see what it feels like after all this time. But I fell asleep reading my notes. I woke up in the evening and tried again, and fell asleep again. I woke up this morning and actually managed to get past an entire page before my attention got diverted. Being far too well rested to sleep again, I ended up drawing moustaches on all the people in the newspaper (which was unlucky enough to be lying around) with my black pen. They came out pretty well too.

Moving on, a friend has successfully undergone an overnight transformation into an ass. One day he was okay, and the next he was suddenly acting all hoity-toity, bitching about me all over the place. It was quite alarming, seeing a normal and good-natured person change into a foul-mouthed ass.
Now, as a rule, I do not hold grudges against people who bitch about me or detest me, mainly because, being one of the most arrogant and intolerable people around, I realize that I well deserve most of the names by which I am addressed, and that if I went around holding grudges against people who call me these names, I would probably be holding grudges against most of the people I know, and quite a few I don’t. But there are limits to my tolerance, and overnight changes in attitude, I found out recently, surpass these limits. Overnight changes piss me off. They disturb routine. And when they involve a ‘friend’ destroying my meticulously cultivated image among people I have known for a fairly long period of time, they disturb routine rather adversely. I could, of course, talk to the person involved, sort things out, and, that done, proceed to forget about the entire incident, but, aggressive and vengeful bastard that I am, I shall not. I shall have to, to put it quite bluntly, kill him.

While we are on the subject of killing, Kanthapura is killing me. It is the most boring book ever, and the language is all awry. I could have, like most of my friends (Many of them are doing the same Humanities course as I am, and have to, therefore, read Kanthapura like me.) left it midway, but I have issues with leaving books half-read. I have never, and I say this with much pride, abandoned a book midway, which basically means nothing more than the fact that I have spent a very large part of my life reading absolute crap. I could go on and on about Kanthapura, but I intend to devote an entire post to it, for a few of my friends have urged me to write a brief summary of it on this blog, so that they can save themselves the trouble of going through it on their own. I shall, therefore, refrain from further commenting on the book in this post.

In other news, quizzing season at IITD has begun. The first inter-hostel quiz of the year was held on Friday. Rohan Trivedi and Shalabh Gupta, the quizmasters, did a wonderful job, and came up with some amazing questions. The quiz was, consequently, lots of fun. It was also lots of fun because, for the first time since I’ve been participating in QC events, our team came first. From what I heard later, it has been a rather long time since Jwalamukhi finished first in an inter-hostel quiz. Wonderful, innit?

What’s even more wonderful is the fact that I started growing my first wisdom tooth yesterday. It came out of my gums. It hurts a lot, but I don’t mind much, for, contrary to all indications, I might finally be growing up.